"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[Mike Cleven]

At 12:31 AM 2/5/99 -0800, David Lewis wrote:
>-snip-
>dropped from an estimated 22 million to 15 million
>>-- it wouldn't reach that level until the beginning of the 18th century.
>-snip-
>
>I think a good proportion could be useful in understanding the magnitude of
>the plagues of the world. I wish I had all of the figures in front of me
>but I don't.  The European plagues were ongoing, over a period of
>centuries. This allowed for their populations to rebound and for their
>societies and cultures to survive. In the Americas the native people were
>inundated with differing plagues in a matter of years. the result is that
>native populations were not given the chance to rebound. When historians
>talk about  the great plagues of Europe and of the percentage of people
>killed, mortallity rates, they are primarily talking about mortallities
>over centuries of successive plagues. In the Americas, when we talk about
>genocide by plague, we are talking about nations being nearly wholely wiped
>out, with no one able to carry on the traditions, in a matter of years, a
>time so fast that whole villages were found deserted, with the remains of
>dead people lying around. This is the difference between some resistance
>and zero resistance. few people survived such that in the one hundred years
>of settlement of Oregon, 97% of the native people were dead. ( I think this
>is from Beckham somewhere.) If we look further into what was not allowing a
> population rebound, we see settlement and mining and wars of extermination
>in the way of cultural survival. This same situation did not occur in
>Europe, a place already nearly resource depleted.

[wow is this getting far from Chinoook ..... ;-)......but ultimately the
history of the region is also at issue, so therefore this is "on topic"]

I agree with your comments about the suddenness and severity of the plagues
in North America vs. the centuries of repetition and resilience in Eurasia.
 However, your last comment about Europe already being nearly resource
depleted does not apply to the 14th Century; if there had not still been
abundant resources in Europe in the 18th and 19th Century, the Industrial
Revolution would simply not have happened.  Somewhere here in my library I
have a book left over from an old cultural geography course called "The
Making of the English Landscape", which chronicles the precise changes in
the vegetation and land qualities of England over the centuries from
ancient times to modern.  It appears that right into Elizabethan years,
even into the Restoration and the early Industrial Revolution, that great
swathes of England were still wilderness - whether heath or deep oak forest
depending on the county and terrain.  The same was true of continental
Europe, where (as in Tolkien's description of the ancient forests) it was
supposed to have been possible for a squirrel to jump from tree to tree all
the way from Madrid to Moscow - right into the 1800s.  The same is also
true, of course, from the Mississippi to New England not so long ago......

Spain was denuded of its once-lush forests (similar to the NWs) for the
Spanish Armada and the legions of galleons of the Spanish Main; France and
England followed suit in their own time, with wood-burning for industry
adding to the demands of the fleets.  Growing populations meant growing
agricultural needs, and hence greater land clearing measures; but all this
happened well after the Middle Ages; even well after the Renaissance,
despite the antiquity of human presence on the European landscape.

Europe was stripped of its natural splendours almost as rapidly as were the
settled parts of North America.  British Columbia and other frontier areas
are being stripped even faster because of larger markets and more efficient
industrialization.  But before industrialization and the larger populations
that followed upon it, human change upon the land was a slow-going process,
and the Earth did not give up its glories easily......